The horrific state of our social housing is a stain on the nation. There's only one way to fix it

In any crisis, there must come a turning point. A moment of such profound shock that everything and everyone stops and says: enough. But what if, when that moment comes, we just keep driving? The shock subsides, the soul searching is called off, and the crisis carries on. 

What would it take to stop the housing crisis, to stop the scourge of unsafe housing, to end child homelessness, to prevent people dying because their homes are not fit for human life? These are the questions I have been asking for the last five years, ever since I walked into a tower block in Croydon in South London and discovered the most appalling homes in Britain. Where water poured through light fittings, black mould was writ large across ceilings, where children were in danger of electrocution. In 21st-century Britain, in its capital city dripping with wealth, families left to rot in homes owned not by private landlords but by the British state. 

My investigation, which began in that council tower block, has taken me across the country into hundreds of homes, after receiving thousands of messages, from social housing tenants trapped in squalor. I began in 2021. Four years after the Grenfell disaster. As smoke poured into the night sky from a tower block in West London and 72 men, women and children died, politicians promised tenants would never be ignored like that again.

Yet in 2022, I stood on the Fremantle estate in Rochdale, days after an inquest had found two-year-old Awaab Ishak had died because of the mould and damp in his housing association flat, speaking to a pregnant woman in the flat below showing me mould that she feared would harm her newborn. 

I took the rickety tin-box lift to the first floor of a nine-storey high-rise in Lewisham, the door screeching open to reveal an electric mobility scooter on the outside walkway before the door of number five. “Hello Dan, be careful not to slip,” Mehdi said, clinging to his Zimmer frame, breathless. 

He had been right to warn me. The entire floor in Mehdi’s hallway was flooded. He had placed towels along the narrow corridor, but they too were soaked, like it had been raining inside. 

As we turned left out of the entrance hall and down a narrow corridor, I involuntarily blurted: “Oh my god.” The smell was horrific, like raw sewage, sharp in my nostrils. The walls were stained a mosaic of browns, blacks and yellows. They were as wet as the floor, sweating a dark liquid, droplets of murky water weaving and gathering in pools at our feet. Mehdi had said in his email that he felt he was dying, the home he lived in slowly killing him. He was not exaggerating. 

The walls were crumbling. Mehdi delicately peeled off wet plaster – layer upon layer falling away like papier-
mâché. When I asked how long the flat had been like this, Mehdi ran his hand across the wall outside the bathroom and showed me his palm – it was completely covered black, dripping.

“A good six or seven years now,” he replied. “I don’t feel like even going in there because it stinks. I’m making myself more dirty, rather than cleaning myself.”

Inside the bathroom, white walls were stained with dark mould spores, the air thick with damp, the stench unbearable. 

“I have told them about 25 times. Every time they come and go and every time I ring them back, and they just say the work has been completed, “we’ve found the leak”. It doesn’t feel like I’m living in London, in the United Kingdom. It’s making me crazy. And I just simply don’t know what to do.’

Read more:

• Awaab Ishak: Why Rochdale toddler’s death is being described as a ‘defining moment’
• Meet the man trying to improve Britain’s social housing
• Housing campaigner Kwajo Tweneboa calls for action on UK’s biggest housing association after damning watchdog report

At the start of 2021 both social services and Citizens Advice made representations to Lewisham Homes to move Mehdi out. A report by an occupational therapist stated the flat was a fire risk due to the electrics under the leaks. Watching Mehdi hunched over a walking frame, coughing up his lungs, water falling on his back as he dragged himself onto the sofa to hook himself up to breathing equipment, he looked broken. 

After we published our report, Mehdi was moved out and Lewisham Homes apologised. Their own assessment found the flat was not fit for human habitation. Mehdi’s was one of the worst I have seen in the past five years reporting on the housing crisis, but it was not a one-off.  

The findings of our investigation led to a change in the law for social housing tenants: their rights strengthened with more regulation of the landlords leaving them in squalor. But five years on, the emails keep coming, not just from social housing tenants but homeless families stuck in temporary homes, unable to afford private rent, unable to get a social home.

You can drown in the statistics: 1.3 million on the social housing waiting list, 176,000 homeless children, £4 million spent per day by London councils alone on temporary accommodation. Each stat is not just a story, but a stain, on any country purporting to be decent and civilised. 

There is hope, there has to be. But it will take more than tinkering around the edges of rights and regulations and rental reform. As important as they are, what is required is a major shift in the priority politicians give housing. We cannot tackle poverty, social and generational inequality, poor health outcomes, an ever-
burgeoning welfare bill, sluggish economic growth, falling fertility rates, public apathy and the rise of extreme political alternatives without addressing the biggest long-term social issue in Britain today.

And that can only happen, I have concluded, by building social housing. The selling off of social homes since the 1980s without replacing them has pushed people into a private rental sector they cannot afford, tipping them into homelessness, keeping them trapped into ageing and, in some cases, unsafe social housing stock that needs to be replaced. Britain needs truly affordable housing, and only the state can make that happen. The market has proven, since Thatcher, that it is not going to provide homes for everyone who needs one. Why would it? 

Successive UK governments have retreated from their basic duty to look after citizens, by failing to ensure there are enough safe, decent places for them to live. That is the root of so many of our current ills. Only a major programme of state-led housebuilding can end the crisis. Or will we just keep on driving, waiting for another disaster? 

Left to Rot: How Governments Have Betrayed Us and How We Fix It by Daniel Hewitt is out now (Policy Press, £19.99). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. 

Change a vendor’s life.

Buy from your local Big Issue vendor every week – and always take the magazine. It’s how vendors earn with dignity and move forward.

You can also support online:
Subscribe to the magazine or support our work with a monthly gift. Your support helps vendors earn, learn and thrive while strengthening our frontline services.

Thank you for standing with Big Issue vendors.